Olá a todos! Below I’ve shared a brief excerpt from my recent Substack piece about different ways to use ChatGPT for learning European Portuguese. Please check out the complete article if you’re interested.
… This is currently my favorite GPT because it’s the one that most frequently surprises and delights me. The most recent addition to my AI tutoring staff, it was born out of a need I only felt once I started texting regularly in EP. It’s designed to solve a familiar problem in second-language learning: the fact that grammatical accuracy doesn’t guarantee naturalness.
I can explain using the familiar example of birthdays. In English, you can have a birthday, but the Portuguese don’t say ter um aniversário. Instead, they say fazer anos, which sounds natural to them, but the translation, make years, won’t make sense to most English speakers. Similarly, you can say Feliz Aniversário! (a direct translation of Happy Birthday!) to a Portuguese person, and they’ll know exactly what you mean, but among themselves, it’s much more common to say Parabens! (Congratulations!). Language learning is full of these divergences between what is grammatically correct and how people actually say it.
That’s where the EP Colloquializer comes in …
